


lost in translation

by ryseling



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Communication, Fjord Has Issues (Critical Role), M/M, POV Caleb Widogast, Self-Loathing Caleb Widogast, Spoilers For Episode 76 Of Campaign 2, but he's working on them now!!, but strangely mostly Fjord-centric, it's relatively minor here but just in case, mostly just introspective nonsense, or lack thereof, that kinda goes without saying with Caleb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 07:30:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20485157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryseling/pseuds/ryseling
Summary: It took them a long time to understand each other.Even the day they bound themselves together, blood mixing in the water and smearing between their palms, the day Fjord said “we understand each other,” there were things that neither of them understood.Caleb reflects on his relationship with Fjord, and on the differences between the two of them.





	lost in translation

**Author's Note:**

> I just have A Lot Of Feelings about 76 and needed to get some of them out. This started as a stream of consciousness, so it might be kind of disorganized or ramble-y.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy me internally combusting over these two lovelies for just under 1.7k words~

It took them a long time to understand each other.

Even the day they bound themselves together, blood mixing in the water and smearing between their palms, the day Fjord said “_we understand each other_,” there were things that neither of them understood.

Secrets weren’t new, for their group. They were all liars - they’d all known it, too. Since the very beginning, even. Whether they were working together or not, a great many things went unsaid between them all.Some things were dragged into the light - slowly, painstakingly, often unwillingly - but they allhad things they didn’t want others to know, and their slow growth into trusting each other didn’t change that.

No, what changed things was Molly’s death. A liar, like the rest of them, but perhaps the most honest liar of them all. All the light and joy and laughter that he had worn like armor, stripped away in an instant. Caleb remembered, in horrible, vivid detail, how he had looked naked, without any of the life he had always worn so well.

His secrets were buried with him. Whoever Mollymauk Tealeaf had been before he decided to be himself, before he met the Mighty Nein, none of them would ever know.

Honesty didn’t come quickly. Perhaps it just wasn’t in their nature, for most of them. Things went unsaid, things were hidden, things were bitten back. But slowly, truth leaked out through the cracks.

The day of the blood pact hadn’t been the beginning of their understanding. _Agreement_ and _alliance_ were not the same thing - they had agreed they would make this group work, and they allied themselves in their respective quests for knowledge and power, but they didn’t _understand_.

They spoke differently, was the thing. In a literal sense - Fjord’s honeyed drawl sounded like music, so different from the sound of his own voice, quiet and broken by subtle falters when he spoke in Common instead of Zemnian - but in more important ways than that, too. It was apparent from the first time they met, but, as many things with them, it took a while to parse out.

Fjord’s open fascination with his magic, and the admiration and praise he heaped on Caleb’s shoulders in the beginning was overwhelming. Caleb recoiled from it, deflected it, shrank away from it - he deserved none of it, especially not from Fjord, someone who he recognized so quickly as someone who was _good_, no matter his mistakes or flaws or secrets. Fjord grew more reticent with his compliments as time passed, no longer quite so overwhelming, but just as undeserved.

But that alone painted the differences between them clearly.

Caleb knew all too well the difficulties he had in voicing his care for others. The group had ribbed him about it enough - Jester’s cooing over how red his ears got and Beau’s light griping over how he hardly ever seemed to look any of them in the eye were rarely far from his mind. Instead, he did his best to look after everyone.

It could be difficult to do, with how often he stayed to the back of the group, out of the range of direct conflict. He did his best, whenever they were all in trouble, to get them back out and to protect the people he had come to care for, but he would take any other opportunity that arose to do the same.

He paid for things. Or tried to. It was easier, to help those around him in those ways, than to force words from his mouth in a language that was not his own, words that tasted like smoke and ash and blood. He wasn’t sure if they knew that’s what he was doing, when he offered to cover costs - tried not to take it as a rejection whenever any of them refused to let him pay for something - but he did it willingly, when he could.

He gave up the Dodecahedron to save all of their lives.

When other opportunities to help arose, he took those, too. They all did. They went to sea, became pirates, to help Fjord try to find Vandran. They crossed enemy lines and wound up allied with the Dynasty, to help Nott rescue Yeza. They traveled to through cold, dangerous land to bring Caduceus to the Kiln and to Uthodurn to fulfill his visions from the Wildmother.

(They traveled to Bazzoxan. They tracked Obann. They tried to help Yasha, too, to understand the part of her past she didn’t remember. They _tried_, and she turned on them, and Caleb thought perhaps that burned worse than any arcane flame that had ever scorched his skin.)

When Fjord told them that he had cast the falchion into the Kiln’s flames, speaking to them in the voice that was his own, laying bare what he had kept hidden for so long (_himself_), Caleb reached for his hand.

He gave Fjord the glove, and one by one, the other members of their patchwork of a family armed him with tools to defend himself, to defend _them_, in the absence of the magic he had relied so heavily on for so long. Fjord had looked lost, in the face of all the care and acceptance, fumbling to keep hold of everything that was given to him. “_Oh no_,” Caleb remembered hearing, soft and nearly distressed, the look on the half-orc’s face so woefully overwhelmed that Caleb had to swallow down the urge to reach for him again.

There were a lot of things Fjord didn’t say. They were a lot alike, but the differences between the two of them were language barriers of their own, even when they were both speaking Common. But laying bare the person he had tried to hide from them for so long, Caleb felt that finally, _finally_, he _did_ understand.

Fjord had been told to be someone else his whole life. The first bit of that he divulged to them - the picking at his tusks, chipping them away so other children in the orphanage he grew up in would have one less thing to mock - was piled upon by other things in the wizard’s mind. A multitude of instances; wielding powers he knew nothing about, adopting a fake accent that he kept up for _months_ (even around them), the uncertainty he always seemed to regard his own body with. The pact they had made beneath the ocean was an extension of that. Fjord was brave, and reckless, and he had said more than once that he _liked_ having the powers he possessed, but the arcane knowledge and skill that he had been seeking since their first meeting was not worth his life. Was not worth his _self_.

(A hateful, insidious part of him whispered that Fjord must have made the pact as part of his deception, that he hadn’t meant it, because why would he ever _mean_ to tie himself to such a disgusting person? 

Caleb did his best to ignore those thoughts. Even if he would _deserve_ it if something so important to him was all a lie, he had too much faith in Fjord’s goodness to believe that he would promise something like that and not follow through.)

Fjord’s voice was intimately tied with his sense of self. He had told them speaking like Vandran had made people _listen_ \- something he hadn’t received when he was just himself. As much as he sometimes struggled with words, speaking and being heard was _important_ to Fjord.__

Caleb could do everything in the world for this man - _would_, given the opportunity - and understanding could still elude them both, because, on some level, Fjord needed to hear things _said_. It wasn’t enough to _do_ things, not when Fjord had been told his whole life, with vicious, hurtful words, that he wasn’t right.

So, when Reani asked why they had kept Fjord in the hut with him and Caduceus in Gelidon’s lair (as if they could ever _keep_ Fjord anywhere), Caleb opened his mouth and spoke of Fjord’s talents. When they packed up to return to the Kiln, he pulled Fjord aside. He told him, on no uncertain terms, that he had no reason to feel less than the rest of them, to feel less than _anyone_.

It was still difficult. Caleb couldn’t make himself say even half of what he wanted to. Couldn’t force himself to tell Fjord how much he meant to him, to the group - couldn’t bring himself to fess up to all the many, many mixed feelings that had been brewing inside of him for long enough for it to be embarrassing. Couldn’t admit to the awful-wonderful fuzziness that sprang up in his chest and knotted itself in his throat whenever Fjord complimented him; encouraged him; made low, rumbling sounds in his chest that always reminded him of Frumpkin; shared private little smiles with him in the quiet moments when it was just the two of them, or in the loud moments where everyone was hollering and causing chaos at once and they happened to lock eyes to share a second or two of fondly exasperated camaraderie.

Caleb couldn’t say all of it. Wouldn’t, even if he could - anyone would deserve better than him, especially Fjord. (And maybe, in part, because he was too afraid of how the half-orc might react, of what might come of it.)

But he told Fjord that he was enough, and gave him the book they’d stolen from the Tumblecarves. Despite the intent eagerness that he’d had in obtaining the arcane object, despite his own insatiable curiosity, despite the hungry, selfish urge to hoard the arcane knowledge for himself - he pressed the book into Fjord’s hand and told him he would get more use out of it than Caleb himself.

_Understand me_, he willed, perhaps more fervently than any spell he’d ever uttered aloud. _Please, understand._

And when Fjord accepted the book, bewildered - thanked him for it, earnest and quiet - and spent what time he could on their journey back to the Kiln reading, sending several long, thoughtful, startlingly soft and awed looks in his direction over the edge of the book, Caleb thought, perhaps, _finally_, Fjord did. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not over a single thing that happened in 76 and I'm on the edge of my seat for whatever goes down in 77, so expect more CR content from me in the future


End file.
